"Travel back in time to experience the death of magic."

Why did the use of magic or any reference to magic being
practiced in the present tense just stop in the year 1851?
Did a specific event in the history of our world trigger the
demise of magic? Or could it have been the advent of a
certain technology? These are the questions that form up the
premise of THE RISE AND FALL OF D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson
and co-author Nicole Galland. The aforementioned D.O.D.O. is
a secret government organization that is charged with
discovering why magic just disappeared as a real thing and
became something more fictional or legendary. The main
character Melisande Stokes is an expert in linguistics who
is asked by Tristan Lyons, a leading member of D.O.D.O. to
help translate ancient texts that he hopes will shed more
light on the mystery of the total disappearance of magic.
While completing their work, Melisande and Tristan develop a
device that allows them to travel back in time. This device
may be the key to perhaps finding the answers they seek and
altering the events that occurred over 150 years ago with
the hopes of keeping magic alive. The problem is when you
interact with people and meddle in events from the past, it
can have some very dire and catastrophic results for the
present day. Consequently, in blindly seeking the answers to
their questions, Melisande and Tristan may have opened a
Pandora's Box that they wish they could slam shut.

Neal Stephenson has long been a favorite author of mine, so
I am always going to read any new book written by him. When
I found out that he co-authored THE RISE AND FALL OF
D.O.D.O. with Nicole Galland, I was intrigued even more. I
was not previously familiar with Nicole's work but soon
discovered that she has contributed to the Mongoliad series
which is a project of different authors that was started by
Neal Stephenson. I have to say that I enjoyed this book
immensely. It has all of the elements that I crave in a
great read: a solid mystery, historical backdrop,
time-travel, witchcraft, and thrilling action sequences. I
found the references to witches and their history to be the
most fascinating aspect of the story. We get a ton of info
regarding the Salem Witch Trials as well as other events in
history that involved witches and witchcraft. The
time-travel part of the story also worked incredibly well
for me. I liked the way the authors handled how manipulating
and injecting yourself into the past can have some very real
consequences for the present-day and future. That is where
the story ultimately hooked me and had me turning pages
frantically late into the evening hours. I wholeheartedly
recommend THE RISE AND FALL OF D.O.D.O. to those who love
historical fiction with a little dose of fantasy and
alternate history. This book also made me want to pick up
more of Nicole Galland's books and give them a try.

SUMMARY

From bestselling author Neal Stephenson and critically
acclaimed historical and contemporary commercial novelist
Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-
future thriller combining history, science, magic,
mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very
foundations of the modern world.

When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and
languages, accidently meets military intelligence
operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard
University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that
will alter their lives and human history itself. The
young man from a shadowy government entity approaches
Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible
offer. The only condition: she must sign a nondisclosure
agreement in return for the rather large sum of money.

Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents,
which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove
that magic actually existed and was practiced for
centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution
and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and
endangered its practitioners. Magic stopped working
altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition
at London’s Crystal Palace—the world’s fair celebrating
the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something
about the modern world "jams" the "frequencies" used by
magic, and it’s up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic Operations—D.O.D.O. —
gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device
that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives
back in time to keep it alive . . . and meddle with a
little history at the same time. But while Tristan and
his expanding operation master the science and build the
technology, they overlook the mercurial—and treacherous—
nature of the human heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that
characterize all of Neal Stephenson’s work and steeped
with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole
Galland’s storytelling style, this exciting and vividly
realized work of science fiction will make you believe in
the impossible, and take you to places—and times—beyond
imagining.